We decided to write our own 'I'm New Here' stories.
We brainstormed all of the things we remembered about being new and then chose one to add more detail about. Ms Miriam modelled this for us first, making sure that she was 'thinking aloud' so that we could hear what she thought when she was writing.
We could write in our Mother Tongues if that was easier for us. Airi wrote in Japanese. Here she is translating her Japanese into English for Ms Miriam.
We still have to go back and add more detail to make it more entertaining for the reader and make sure that all of our surface features (capital letters, full stops etc) are correct.
We are going to make these into bilingual stories once we have finished. We might need some help translating them back into our Mother Tongues but this is a great opportunity for us to develop our Mother Tongues as we develop our English!
"The level of development of children’s
mother tongue is a strong predictor of
their second language development." Jim Cummins
